I had a problem with 'tell'. I used 'tell' then 'seek' to the same position, but it was 12 bytes off. Eventually I tried to changing the file from UNIX format to DOS format (I'm using Perl 5.006 on Win95). This fixed the problem. As you can probably guess the line I was working on was the twelfth in the file. It took me a while to find this problem because the file would read in fine. If Perl is supposed to work with either LF or CR LF then 'tell' should work with both as well.